Now Official: Google Adds Restaurant Menus To Search Results

Google announced that it’s now showing restaurant menus as a OneBox-style answer at the top of its search results. It seems to be primarily triggered by searches that involve both the restaurant name and the word “menu,” although Google’s example involves a query that starts with “show me the menu for….”

The menu OneBox shows multiple food options and is divided into different categories, depending on how the individual restaurants (or chains) organize their menu. You’ll typically see tabs such as lunch, dinner, entreés, sandwiches and the like.

There’s actually more that we don’t know about the menus than we do. For example:

Where is Google getting the menu details? It seems to be from sites like AllMenus.com and Gayot.com, but there’s no official list.

Has Google made a deal with its sources to show the menus, or is it just scraping that information?

What should a restaurant do if it wants its menu showing like this?

What if it doesn’t want its menu showing this way for some reason? (It’s outdated, for example.)

How often will Google be updating the menu information?

We’ve put some of these questions to our contacts at Google, but since it’s Friday evening, we may not get a reply immediately.

Postscript: A Google spokesperson told us the data for these menus come from a 3rd party data provider. Here is Google’s statement:

We get all of our menu data from a partner, similarly to how we show other types of answers, like weather. As our data comes from a 3rd party provider, we cannot add menus for individual restaurants directly, but we are constantly working to expand our database of menus and restaurants.

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About The Author

Matt McGee is the Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. After leaving traditional media in the mid-1990s, he began developing and marketing websites and continued to provide consulting services for more than 15 years. His SEO and social media clients ranged from mom-and-pop small businesses to one of the Top 5 online retailers. Matt is a longtime speaker at marketing events around the U.S., including keynote and panelist roles. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog.

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Now Official: Days of free lunch are over! Google Search is morphing into a hardcore media property who wants to become “the internet”.

PlumbSearcher

Data are very old. They do not scrape web pages. They just get data from a provider which provide old outdated data. Coverage is low.

http://lostpr.es/ David Iwanow

Hmmm I can imagine a whole bunch of michelin star restaurants type locations would be livid at the idea because of how it displays their menus

http://www.antique-marks.com/ RJ Irwin

Wouldn’t the data come from opengraph tags were the restaurant has marked up their website with the appropriate tags?

JK ShinTruth

Great strategy, show out of date menu information forcing restaurants to maintain it for free (for added bonus via Google+)

Sandro Galindo

Can’t wait to learn more. Half our clients are restaurants and we need to be ready for this. Whether it’s schema.org markup or a 3rd party.

Durant Imboden

It seems to me that a OneBox-style restaurant blurb with menu items *is* a free lunch, for the restaurant if not for the consumer. It’s a nice big ad that the restaurant doesn’t have to pay for.

http://www.it-sales-leads.com/ Barbara Mckinney

As far as I can see, this doesn’t work for every restaurant yet and it’s unclear where Google is getting this data from.I don’t know how sites that specialize in showing you restaurant menus feel about this addition, but once Google adds more restaurants, I’m pretty sure I’ll use this feature pretty regularly.

http://www.CheesyCorporateLingo.com/ Patrick Reinhart

cool?

Guest

The menus displaying for my restaurant are grossly inaccurate with pricing and items from 3-5 years ago including one category that has not been offered since 2002. If they are pulling from allmenus.com or other popular menu sites, they haven’t done a recent scrape. We’ve had SinglePlatform update all our online menus in the past 6 months across dozens and NONE of these old ones are out there anywhere except now on Google.